September 20, 1987

A Writer at His Best

By MICHAEL RUHLMAN

ajor events seem to happen to Reynolds Price on significant dates. He's proud of that, in an eerie way, as though such coincidences were proof that the world, like the novels he writes, is ordered by a single being with a curious sense of humor. In 1933, Price's mother went into protracted, nearly fatal, labor with him just hours after Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany.

So there was cause for some nervous chuckling on the day in May 1984 when, after noticing stiffness in his legs, Price checked into a hospital during an eclipse of the sun. He laughs now and says this was ''something no self-respecting primitive would have done.'' The visit resulted in the discovery of a malignant tumor the size of a pencil twisting down the top of his spine.

Between then and last November, Price endured three lengthy operations to remove the tumor and five and a half weeks of radiation therapy. For months, he woke at 4 A.M. or so, not knowing how long he would last. At one point, his doctors believed he had five weeks to live. He watched the use of his legs disintegrate and become permanently lost. He was in almost constant pain.

I had seen him only once since 1983, when I was a student in one of his English classes at Duke University. I remember how he would weave rapidly through throngs of students on the way to his office, an ebullient but enigmatic campus figure. Last February, when I arrived at his home near Durham, N.C., I saw, as he lifted himself from his wheelchair to stretch his upper body, that his fierce smile had not changed. He seemed to be testing the irreversible bondage that now held him. ''Sizzle, zap!'' he said. Then, lowering himself to the chair: ''Sit you down, buddy.''

He says that cancer has brought about only one major change in his life. He now does more of what he has been doing successfully for the last 30 years - writing.

Reynolds Price is the author of 14 books, including poetry, essays, plays, biblical translations and stories, but it is as a novelist that he has earned widest recognition. Working primarily in a Southern tradition reminiscent of Faulkner, Price's fiction depicts a rural and small-town South, mostly during the 1940's and 50's, the time, he says, ''when I was coming onto the scene as an observing device.''

Though the time and place do vary in his work - from turn-of-the-century North Carolina to modern-day England - what remain constant are Price's lyrical, obsessive voice and his dense prose. His Southern Gothic tales of families cohering and dispersing in the wake of suicide and murder, of lethal childbirth and romantic entanglements, are considered by some readers and critics to be forced, overly mannered and repetitious, but others praise their linguistic agility, their accuracy and power.

Critics generally agree, however, that Price is at his best when he writes from the point of view of his female characters, as in his last novel, ''Kate Vaiden,'' the story of an orphan woman who abandons her own child. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction of 1986 and was Price's most commercially successful book. His very first novel also contained a vivid heroine, and in November Atheneum is publishing a 25th-anniversary edition of that book, ''A Long and Happy Life,'' the story of Rosacoke Mustian, the virginal young North Carolina girl and her motorcyclist suitor, Wesley Beavers. (Price used Rosacoke in another novel and a short story.) Price's work attempts to shed light on the nature of human relationships. It shows how people, as they struggle awkwardly to understand their own position in the cosmos, love and harm one another. ''All narrative artists,'' Price says, ''are very much involved in telling the only story we really want to hear, which is: 'History is the will of a just God who knows me.' Now, that either is or isn't true. I hope it is.''

Price's method in fiction is to establish thoughtful characters and then drop them into situations in which they must make choices. The choices may be prosaic -whether to leave home or stay - or more momentous - whether to have a child or not - but all of them have serious, sometimes fatal, consequences. The characters often attempt, however futilely, to expiate their past mistakes. In the end, many of them manage enough self-awareness to move forward in life with more care than when they began.

For many months after his treatment for cancer began, Price was able to do little more than sit in his own room obsessively drawing pictures, as he had done as a child. But then came a burst of work that, at least by his previous rate of output, was quite surprising. He finished the last two-thirds of ''Kate Vaiden,'' three plays, a volume of poems, a volume of essays scheduled to appear in December, and his seventh novel, ''Good Hearts,'' to be published next spring. In ''Good Hearts,'' he returns to the characters he created in ''A Long and Happy Life,'' fixing his steady gaze once again on Rosacoke and Wesley.

REYNOLDS PRICE'S home, set amid the birch and pine outside Durham, has a new addition, with a Jacuzzi and sun deck. This makes his life in a wheelchair easier and also houses the overflow of photographs, paintings, statues, skulls, life masks, icons, old coins and books he has collected compulsively all his life. He no longer lives alone. A helper, usually a graduate student, boards with him to prepare meals and do chores. His sedentary life has given him a decided paunch, but Price remains an elegant man with a frequent smile and a rich baritone that falls into the tidewater accent of his parents whenever he is with a fellow North Carolinian. He fiddles with a set of beads as he speaks about his newest book and of the development of his craft.

'' 'Good Hearts' is a moral fable about the near destruction but rescue of a marriage,'' he says. ''It's very different from the other Mustian novels. It takes up with Rosacoke and Wesley when she's 48 and he's 50. They've been married for many years. They've lived the vast majority of their lives in a small American city, not in the rural agricultural countryside.''

Price had not intended to write this novel, but in July 1986, while he was typing notes for a new, first-person novel, the Rosacoke-Wesley story dawned on him very powerfully. He dropped the first-person tale and dived in. ''I don't know what made my unconscious mind leap off the track that I'd been trying to pursue onto an old one,'' he says. Rosacoke and Wesley ''demanded to be watched again,'' he says, and he found that they had proceeded with their own lives much as he had his. They had acquired ''a great amount of emotional resonance. They've become tools with which I can economically and rapidly do a lot of work.''

Price believes that his imagination works inextricably with his unconscious. The unconscious mind, he feels, offers up to him the emotional content of past experience, although in a form no longer recognizable as experience. Part of Price's work as a writer has been to nurture this process. He goes about it as if he were an athlete training his body.

''You train the unconscious mind,'' he says, ''to give you what you need by giving it the right amount of time and whatever nutrition and psychic conditions it needs for its own plans. I don't know that it lies awake at night and writes pages 1 through 15, but when I go to work, the material is simply there.''

Price ascribes no mystical powers to the unconscious, but he believes that it exists, and that it never stops working, even while he is resting or watching movies. He gives his characters emotions from his own past, after the emotions have, as he puts it, ''marinated'' in his unconscious for many years. ''In my case,'' Price says, ''it [ the unconscious ] has to turn the stuff from autobiography into fiction. My brain has to strip an event down, to find what the absolute bottom line is, what the real emotional spiritual narrative content of the experience is so that it can give that experience to characters who are not Reynolds Price and his friends.''

AS A RESULT OF HIS training, Price now relies on the trust that ''if I make a propitious start with interesting characters at an interesting juncture in their lives, a story will be generated.'' But when he was less skilled and just starting out in his career, he needed to know in advance everything that was going to happen.

He tells, for example, how ''A Long and Happy Life'' came to be. In his digs at Oxford, in January 1957, the young Rhodes scholar was reading some newspapers his aunt had sent him from home. ''My mind suddenly produced a picture,'' he says: a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary for a church play. As the vision gathered in his mind, he saw that the girl was Rosacoke Mustian, the heroine of his first published work, a short story that appeared in the British magazine Encounter. As he thought about her in his Oxford room, her image grew sharper, and Price saw that Rosacoke was pregnant. And there it was, the seed of his first novel. Price asked himself, ''How did she get that way, and what's she going to do about it?''

To find out, he began a notebook that he would keep for 20 months. (Now, he can finish a whole book in that time.) Laboriously, he worked his way from the church play backward through events until the story was complete. This 1957 notebook reveals Price as extremely scholarly, but it also indicates his immaturity as a writer and inability to gauge an appropriate length for the material.

He wrote in the notebook: ''Oxford, 3 March 1957 - Before there can be tragic vision, there must surely be certain self-knowledge or at least self-perspective. So Rosacoke must do a great deal of thinking about her mistake and her situation. The problem is how to do it naturally, but not in great long chunks of introspection. She's not that sort, nor am I. She thinks in bits and pieces, jarred into thought 1,000 times a day by a face or a voice or a picture or a bird's song.''

Or: ''5 February 1957 - Reread 'Tess' '' [ Hardy's ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles'' ] . Or, after nearly 100 pages of notes and many months of believing he was writing a short story: ''14 December 1957 -Maybe this thing ought to be a novel.''

In contrast, to begin his novel ''Good Hearts'' 29 years later, Price made notes for only a few days before he understood the act from which the novel would spring: Wesley Beavers would disappear after nearly 30 years of marriage. While writing the opening pages, he realized that after Wesley leaves, a violent attack would befall Rosacoke. Bang! The gates fly open and the story streaks off from there.

''The longer I go on writing fiction,'' Price says, ''the more I am conscious that it's a kind of metabolic activity of my particular brain. I don't want to have a tremendous amount of control over that activity at its earliest levels, just as one can't decide what one is going to dream. I want to see what patterns and curiosities my mind throws up.''

ALTHOUGH MOST OF Price's stories are concerned with people and places of the South, he uses the term ''Southern'' guardedly and is critical of the connotations readers and reviewers now tend to give it. ''They like to use 'Southern' as a diminutive pygmy pigeonhole,'' Price says, ''to make you easier to handle, easier to patronize and discard. If you're Southern, you're Southern in quotes, and you write about big-bellied sheriffs and little old ladies in cobwebby mansions serving tea to two gifted little sexually precocious boys. I've never done that, and I don't intend to.''

''The number of times my novels have been described as being about hillbillies is amazing,'' he says. ''Well, there's not a hillbilly anywhere in my work.'' He points out that Saul Bellow is not labeled a ''Midwestern'' writer nor John Updike a ''New England'' writer, and he believes that ''Southern'' is now invariably a facile and demeaning term that encourages people to ignore what is universal in novels concerning the South.

The region is still, Price says, ''a fertile environment for the production of fascinating fiction,'' because of its unique mixture of dialects, races and religions. ''This part of North Carolina is where 95 percent of my emotional intensity has been grounded. My early childhood familial experiences, and all my later intense emotional experiences have occurred here. It's the most repeated cliche of writers that you're given your basic questions as a human being, the stuff you're obsessed by in your work, before you're pubescent. I happened to be here. Also, from my point of view, I'm the world's authority on this place. It's the place about which I have perfect pitch. I can't strike a false note when I'm writing about this part of the world.''

EDWARD REYNOLDS Price was born in Macon, N.C., and reared in several small Carolina towns amid cotton and tobacco farmers and the omnipresent fear of financial ruin during the Great Depression. He attended high school in Raleigh, where he was first encouraged to pursue writing, and, thereafter, he received a full scholarship to Duke University.

Older writers were of fundamental importance during Price's apprentice years. He met Eudora Welty when he was a senior at Duke. She read his first story and, charmed by his personality and his prose, sent it to her agent, the late Diarmuid Russell, who later became Price's agent.

''What attracted me then to Reynolds,'' Eudora Welty says, ''is what attracts me now, what you can't help but feel - the power of his mind, his thoughts, his sympathy. Only a blind person could have missed the fact that in college he was a good writer already. And he has always advanced, grown. He's just one of our major writers.''

After graduating summa cum laude from Duke, he began three years at Oxford, where he became friends with Lord David Cecil, the critic and biographer, the poet W. H. Auden, who was Professor of Poetry there at the time, and Sir Stephen Spender, the poet and critic who first published Price's work in Encounter.

''The thing about Reynolds when he was young,'' says Spender, ''was that he was incredibly critically conscious in what he wrote; the effects were so conscious that other writers and editors couldn't decide whether it was very good or artificial. Some people absolutely hated it. Dwight Macdonald was infuriated by it and discouraged me from publishing it. It's very interesting and very much to his credit that a writer should provoke such a fury in some readers.

''He is unique, really,'' Spender goes on. ''He ranks very high, with Eudora Welty and, I suppose, Faulkner. Reynolds's writing is a kind of writing that is actually poetry. The dialogue is like real dialogue, but it's been elevated into a special language which he carries through with great consistency. Reynolds persuades one that his characters not only speak in character, but also that they talk out of a whole culture. I was always hoping he'd become an English writer.''

By that, Spender means that he hoped the young man would stay in England, but Price preferred to return to North Carolina. For one thing, he was obliged to help support his widowed mother and younger brother. Since high school, Price knew he wanted to be a writer who taught, so he found accommodation in a small trailer about 200 yards from where he lives now, began teaching at Duke and wrote his first novel.

THE CRITICAL reception in 1962 of ''A Long and Happy Life,'' and of ''The Names and Faces of Heroes,'' a book of stories published the next year, allowed Price from then on to publish virtually anything he wanted to and to teach only one semester a year. Today, he is James B. Duke Professor of English and writer in residence.

Price finished the first third of ''Kate Vaiden'' the day before he entered the hospital, but in the months that followed, as he sat drawing pictures, he could not recapture his heroine's voice. Then, in November 1984, Hendrix College in Arkansas called Price wanting to commission a play from him. He says: ''I just sort of took that as a tap on the shoulder from the Holy Spirit, and I told them, 'O.K., I'll do it. But here's the danger. I might not live to finish the play.' ''

He did finish the play, ''August Snow,'' and its production in Arkansas was so successful and rewarding for Price that it triggered two more plays that winter. These make up a trilogy he calls ''New Music.'' The plays are currently being considered for production by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company. The trilogy comes nearly a decade after the production of Price's first play, ''Early Dark,'' at the W.P.A. Theater, Off Off Broadway, and after a second, ''Private Contentment,'' was written for public television's ''American Playhouse'' in 1982.

As he finished ''August Snow,'' the engines of his unconscious continued to crank, the voice of his heroine Kate Vaiden returned and he finished the novel. No change in tone is noticeable at the point where he broke off and then resumed work - between pages 120 and 121 of the book. But another work that bridges his life before and after cancer does show a distinct change in voice. It is a sequence of 35 poems called ''Days and Nights,'' published in ''The Laws of Ice'' (1986). Unlike his fiction, Price's poetry addresses the actual physical and psychical events of his life, and, in ''Days and Nights,'' he began sketches of events that would become, in effect, a journal of the discovery of the spinal tumor.

''Because my fiction has not fed directly off the daily events of my life,'' he says, ''I began to feel, in my late 30's and 40's, that there was a tremendous amount of significant narrative emotional material that was slipping through the cracks of my work. An awful lot was happening in my life that never got into my fiction. I didn't want it all to be lost, and I began to try to weave nets to catch those things.''

Though much of Price's work is concerned with the emotions and obligations of family, he has never felt the need for one of his own. He relates to the next generation through his students, many of whom have become novelists themselves - Anne Tyler, Josephine Humphreys, David Guy. The students have provided, he says, an outlet for his natural paternal instincts.

Price does write about erotic love, both heterosexual and homosexual, because, he says: ''It's the most powerful single force in human life. If you eliminate that, then you eliminate the electricity from your universe.'' But he refuses to talk about his own sexuality.

''I've only once in my whole career ever had a person stand up in the audience and ask me if I was gay. And it was a guy, in Florida, and I said, 'Why? Have you fallen hopelessly in love with me?' And the guy just fled from the room.'' Price laughs and continues. ''I have always felt that my private life was private. It's the property of me and the people who've been good enough to be intimate with me. A knowledgeable reader of my work can make whatever deductions he or she wishes to make. All that I wish to say about my life is said in my work.''

For most of his career, Price worked each day until he had produced at least 350 words of polished prose composed in tiny, elegant script. Today, he defies anyone to argue that using a word processor is less efficient than longhand. It is true that Price now spends more time writing each day, but he also puts out more words per hour than ever before. Apparently as the result of patience, maturity and technology, he completes - with technical proficiency - 10 to 15 pages a day that often do not require revision.

Rising at about 8, Price has breakfast and gets to work. That's it. During four months each year, he teaches, usually a course on John Milton and one on writing narrative prose. During the other eight months, he sits at his Displaywriter and writes, taking a break for lunch, an afternoon nap and dinner. He writes some more before bedtime, or cools down by watching the videotape of a movie. He takes Sundays off.

Price has always maintained that writing is very much a physical act, that he makes his work out of his own body, a body recently, as he puts it, ''sawed off at the waist.'' Outwardly, he seems, in the words of Anne Tyler, ''to have that bounce and love of life that he always did have.'' And Price says that, because he had learned already how to sit down and stay put for several hours to write, he has limited the negative effects of the cancer on his life.

He is reluctant to speculate about how his writing will reflect his recent experience -the months he spent on what he thought might be his deathbed, the biofeedback and hypnosis techniques he is learning to control the pain that is common after surgery on the central nervous system. Perhaps, he says, none of this will ever show up in his fiction. He notes, however, the ancient belief that the gods may take something away from a person in order to give him more of something else. ''I'm not saying that I got to be a better writer because my legs got effectively lopped off,'' he says. ''But I do know that writing has come more freely and, perhaps, more richly now than it has at some other times in my life.''

But, aside from what Price says, can a reader find a new sensibility in the form and the subjects of his work? It's probably too early to tell for certain, but ''Good Hearts'' -in fact, most of his work since the cancer - does indicate that he is writing more directly about his own beliefs and focusing more fixedly on the organization and mechanics of the universe.

In ''Good Hearts'' - his ''moral fable'' - he examines the connections between the supernatural and morality. People's actions have an effect on events that would normally seem coincidental. For example, Wesley Beavers deserts Rosacoke, and this does more than leave Rosacoke unprotected. The omniscient narrator implies that Wesley's leaving actually brings an intruder to the home he abandons, that Wesley's leaving causes violence.

In this latest novel, two people - a woman defined by her intellect and a man by his physical prowess - each undergo a physical alteration. Afterward, each must re-evaluate life in order to live married once again.

Does this, I asked my former teacher, mirror Price's own personal struggle with disease over the last three years? If it does, that's news to him, Price says. Interesting news. But then, any such parallel may be insignificant, merely coincidental - like the eclipse of the sun that occurred the day Price entered the hospital.